Firstborn

January 26th, 2010
Mothering

My friend Kristin had a baby last week. Her first. A beautiful, beautiful daughter named Margaret. When I saw the photo I swooned. Now that my baby-making days are far enough behind me I’m free to thoroughly adore the babies of others, whereas a couple of years ago when the transition was still in process I had a difficult time enjoying them. Not because I would wish that the baby would be mine, but because I’d be terrified by the very thought. I’m relieved I can embrace babies again without feeling threatened. Especially now, with Maggie here to love from a distance.

Given my seemingly endless parade of sick kids these days, I’ve been looking for baby gifts online. I stare at the itty bitty caps and the plushy blankets and the soft, pastel-colored newborn toys, and I remember the time so many years ago–seventeen, in fact–when I was preparing for my firstborn’s arrival, and I wonder what Kristin’s initiation as a mother might be like. She’s my age–we were close high school friends–and I can’t imagine having lived all these years outside the boundaries of motherhood. Not because there’s anything inferior or unworthy about such a life, but because mine has been so saturated with babies since the dawn of adulthood that any other path seems fascinatingly foreign. Who would I be today if I’d made different choices in my twenties and thirties? Both Kristin and I have forfeited some experiences in order to have others. Now, at midlife, my friend is just beginning parenthood and I’m finding other meaningful and transformational opportunities for personal growth. I know I wouldn’t change the order of things in my own life if I could; I suspect she wouldn’t either. We’ve both been extremely lucky to have the luxury of choice, as well as the chance to be parents when we wanted to be.

I think of them often, this new mother and daughter just beginning to know each other. I remember the conflicting feelings I had when Elizabeth was born–the transcendent sense of expansion as well as the heaviness of responsibility. Just minutes after her birth it dawned on me that this person would be alive until her life was over, a logically obvious fact that came as a complete surprise. Within a day I gained the uneasy understanding that there are no real breaks in the work of motherhood, that even when the baby slept or was cared for by others I was mentally and emotionally occupied. It was an overwhelming realization at age twenty-one, and I’ll bet it’s equally overwhelming for Kristin at age thirty-eight.

But that daunting knowledge has a welcome flipside. I didn’t really see it until Elizabeth was a few months old, maybe four or five months, and had outgrown her new-baby bewilderment at finding herself in a body on this earth. My mother-love had been constant and fierce from the start, although mixed with plenty of ambivalence and even resentment as I attended to my daughter’s near-constant needs. But as she approached middle babyhood, something amazing happened: she began to emerge as a person. Not merely an incarnation of Everybaby, but a unique human being. She was herself, just as I was myself. And I realized with a deep flush of gratitude that I would have the pleasure of knowing her every day of our lives. It wouldn’t be all pleasure, of course, but at the same time it would be. For somehow, the difficulty and the joy were one and the same.

“She’s always here,” a mutual friend of ours once said when her firstborn was small, and her voice carried a measure of dismay, but also ineffable delight. With four children of my own by that time, I knew exactly what she meant.

And today I’m glad, so very glad, that Kristin will, too.

Delighting in Fatness

January 21st, 2010
Musings

A few days ago I wrenched my skinny shirts from their hangers, folded them into a neat pile, and set it on my dresser.

This triumphant act was months–no, years–in the making. Seriously. I cannot overstate my emotional attachment to my skinny shirts, meaning those shirts that only fit properly when I’m eating sparingly and well, and exercising vigorously and often. In other words, those shirts I never wear. Or wear happily, at least. The collection includes a fitted denim button-down, a black Old Navy criss-cross jersey, two shirt-under-sweater v-necks, and a stretchy dark red number that convinced me I was still hot at a critical moment.

I vividly remember the moment of decision I faced that red-shirt year. After having weathered six pregnancies, I was just about ready to forfeit any and all further attempts at hotness. Staring at my young-yet-not face in the mirror, I seriously considered chucking my cosmetic bag, cutting my hair in a short, sensible style, and buying some stretch pants and sneakers. Going unisex, I thought, would be a huge relief.

Then all of a sudden I realized I was only thirty-two. At some future date, hotness would be taken from me whether I liked it or not, so I might as well capitalize on my remaining years of choice. And so, instead of chopping my hair off, I went out and bought a highlighting kit. And instead of buying stretch pants I bought a deep red stretchy jersey top with a v-neck.

I’m wearing that shirt in my facebook profile photo. Notice the look of triumph.

But here’s the deal. I’m now thirty-eight, and counting. A combination of factors have made it difficult for me to properly enjoy that shirt, as well as the other members of the skinny collection. Age, for one: with every passing year it takes more and more effort to maintain my weight, and I’m just not willing to spend more than an hour a day exercising, and I’m just not willing to forfeit refined carbohydrates because they’re one of my chief joys in life. Medication, for another: when I switched antidepressants last spring I gained 20 lbs within 6 months. And check this out: recently I had my first-ever custom bra fitting, wherein I learned that my bra was three (3) sizes too small. Now that “the girls” are properly supported, there’s a lot less room in all of my shirts, and the skinny ones look downright scandalous.

Still, while I haven’t comfortably worn my skinny shirts for a good long while now, I haven’t wanted to let them go. A while back I gathered them up and moved them to the far end of the closet, not the hidden end, but the end I can easily see. There they hung, daily reminding me of an impossible ideal belonging to a bygone era. The sight wasn’t discouraging. Rather, it enabled me to live in a fluffy pink cloud of denial: “Someday soon I’ll wear those again.” In fact, I was so convinced that this would happen that I didn’t worry much about my actual body size or how I would get from here to there. In my mind, being skinny was a present-day reality.

But the other day, the pink cloud parted. Not dramatically or traumatically, which I’m grateful for. But gently and wisely. I just looked at those shirts and thought, “I’m not going to wear those again. Time to give them to someone who will.”

So, yesterday I brought the pile over to one of my close friends who I deeply care about despite the fact that she weighs 50 pounds less than me. I laid it on her kitchen counter without hesitation, and smiled as I thought about how cute she would look in the black-and-white sweater-shirt thing. I drove home in my supersized bra with my muffin top oozing over my denim waistband, and was warmly greeted by a man who, apparently, thinks middle-aged fleshiness is hot.

I’m inclined to agree.

p.s. I kept the red shirt. It might still work, with a jacket.

A Soperific Christmas

January 10th, 2010
Family

Christmas 2009

Fans and Friends:

Don’t look so dismayed. The only people holding a hard copy of this letter are the ones who send us money every year. Console yourself with this Soper e-letter, and remember, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Elizabeth (16), also known as Elli, recently landed a 4.0 and a 19-year-old boyfriend. Mom pretends to be cool with this, although she almost passed out when she came downstairs to the family room and spotted them “sharing” a beanbag chair. Ben (15) continues to progress toward his goal of total world domination, starting with the high school debate team. (Specialty: public policy. Who would’ve thought?) His tournaments require Mom and Dad to moonlight as taxi drivers, but they’re relieved he’s finally putting his arguing skills to good use. Andrew (12) managed to weasel his way out of school for the past month with various illnesses. He’s back in the saddle now, and might even be ready to take up his fencing foil again soon. Every middle child deserves a weapon.

Christine (10) is also back to public school and trying to exercise patience with the other 5th grade girls, whose only interest is Hannah Montana. (Thanks to her sister’s obsession with Japanese anime, Christine’s tastes run more sophisticated.) Meanwhile, Matt (8) stays busy creating new incarnations of the paper airplane and plotting various ways to capture Bin Laden. Apparently, the two goals are somehow connected. Sam (6) is thoroughly bored with first grade worksheets, but loves Mr. Vierra, his super-young, super-cool teacher from Hawaii. Along with Matt, Sam daily invents new ways to dent walls and stain carpets, but his chief pursuit is competing with Dad for the most and best snuggling time with Mom.

As for me, life is a whirlwind at the ripe old age of 4. Mom and Dad were starting to get the hang of my various Down syndrome-related challenges, so this year I ramped up the intrigue with a diagnosis of Pervasive Developmental Delay (PDD), an autism spectrum disorder. Each week I juggle two preschool programs and several serious occupations on the home front, including advanced toilet flushing and rhythmic cabinet banging. I recently mastered the alphabet, but I refuse to utter a single word—better to maintain my rep as the strong, silent type.

Mom had a big year with two book releases: Gifts 2 (the sequel to her celebrated Down syndrome anthology), and The Year My Son and I Were Born, her memoir about yours truly. Book marketing in the midst of a recession is not for the faint of heart, but Mom came off conqueror and is looking forward to the upcoming release of Year in paperback. She’s sworn to wait a bit before starting her next book, which is good news for Dad, whose back scratching needs have been woefully neglected as of late. And I think we’d all agree that a man who works 12-hour days, tolerates 7 kids, and spins heavy church responsibilities on the side needs his scratchies.

Well, that’s all the news I’m willing to share through corrupt online communication methods. Only the chosen few get to hear the rest of the story. Repent, and you shall be rewarded in 2010.

Thomas Reed Soper

InSEQure

January 24th, 2009
Disability, Thomas

SEQure DX, a first-trimester blood test distributed by Sequenom that could accurately diagnose Down syndrome prenatally was number eight in Time’s list of Top Ten Medical Breakthroughs of 2008.

According to an ABC report about the Sequenom test, 87% of women carrying a child with Down syndrome don’t learn the news until delivery. That was the case for me. I opted out of prenatal testing because the screening available at the time was useless without amniocentesis, and my OB candidly explained that the fetus’s risk of positive diagnosis for T21 and the risk of miscarriage from the amnio were about the same (1:300).

Sequenom’s stock is on the rise. Jim Cramer says buy it. He says SEQure DX is a potentially “revolutionary” product, different than presently available tests because it “captures fetal cells in the mother’s blood and carries no risk to mother or child.”

He’s right, and wrong. The test is indeed revolutionary because it removes the risk of miscarriage from the testing equation–which is a very good thing. But saying it carries no risk is a terrible mistake in semantics.

Let me make this clear from the start: I’m not against prenatal testing, categorically speaking. I’m not against prenatal testing for Down syndrome. I’m not even against SEQure DX, in theory. But in current practice, it’s a different story. Ever since they became available, prenatal screenings for Down syndrome have carried significant risks for the participants because they reveal loaded information. Loaded, as in loaded gun. Although safer in some ways, SEQure DX is much more dangerous in others. Looking beyond the complications of false positives, consider the tens of thousands of mothers using SEQure DX each year who will face life-or-not decisions in the twelfth week of pregnancy, even before they hear a heartbeat or feel a roundhouse kick to the bladder. It’s a risky position, indeed.

Of course, SEQure DX is a controversial product. Some Down syndrome advocates accuse the medical establishment of a Gattaca-like scenario in which medical professionals are deliberately attempting to force fetuses with Down syndrome along the fast track to extinction. I harbor that same concern to some extent, but in my opinion the issue isn’t so black-and-white. OBs, geneticists, and the makers of SEQure DX shouldn’t automatically be tarred with a heavy black eugenics brush. Nor can we blame the whole situation on greed for huge profit margins, although certainly the element of Big Business can’t be ignored. I don’t believe the test necessarily represents evil intent. It’s a tool, and it can be used for good. But is it?

Before SEQure DX, an estimated 90% of fetus with Down syndrome were aborted in the second trimester. I’m relieved beyond words that those women receiving a positive diagnosis who will not carry a fetus with Down syndrome to term for whatever reason will likely be terminating pregnancy at 13 weeks instead of 23. But I’m worried–very worried–about the women on the fence. The grief stemming from a diagnosis of Down syndrome can be strong enough to topple even the most stalwart hearts. I fear that the already astronomical termination rate will rise as women opt out when it’s easier to do so–before the bonds which form and strengthen as pregnancy progresses have a chance to develop.

I wonder if I would’ve said yes to SEQure DX four-and-a-half years ago, when I was pregnant with Thomas. I wonder what I would’ve thought and felt had I opted in and gotten a positive diagnosis. It was hard enough to absorb the news when I had a gorgeous scrunched-up little pink guy to attach the diagnosis to. But I don’t begrudge any woman the information from prenatal testing she desires. Is SEQure DX being used for good? Of course. There are benign reasons for wanting a diagnosis of Down syndrome to come sooner rather than later, and I believe women should continue to have that option. It’s not all about abortion. I’m just sad that so much of it is.

I take heart, though, from legislation like The Kennedy-Brownback bill, shorthand for The Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act. As summarized by Patricia Bauer the purpose of the bill is “to strengthen the informed consent process around prenatal testing.”

It provides for families to receive scientifically sound information about the nature of the condition involved, as well as to help them make connections with support services, websites, hotlines and parent networks. The bill also provides for the development of a national clearinghouse of information for parents of children with disabilities, expansion of peer-support programs, the development of a national registry of families wishing to adopt children with disabilities, and education programs for health care providers who give parents the results of prenatal tests.

President Bush signed the bill on October 8, 2008. Its price tag is $25 million over 5 years. I only wish corporations like Sequenom could be required to ante up. But regardless, if the new law receives needed funding and its stipulations are implemented, women will receive the best possible information and support at the time of diagnosis. And maybe, if they do, the abortion rate of fetuses with Down syndrome won’t move any closer to 100%.

Maybe.

Deliberate Surrender

January 18th, 2009
Musings

There’s a woman in my neighborhood named Joanne. She’s probably sixty-ish, but her smooth, rosy cheeks make her look much younger. Although stalwart in the gospel she rarely comes to church these days because of the effects of severe Type 1 diabetes. But once in a while I see her shuffling a slow course around our cul-de-sac, getting the exercise she needs to help the circulation in her swollen, pain-wracked legs. It takes her about fifteen minutes to complete the circle.

One morning I was outside with my preschoolers when she made her way past our yard, leaning on her husband for support. I told her I missed seeing her at church, and asked her how she was. She responded with one of her typical upbeat replies (the woman has the most positive attitude I’ve ever encountered). But then she paused for a moment. “You know,” she said, “this isn’t how I envisioned spending the rest of my life.”

I almost started to cry right there. Her words were so candid and poignant, so void of self-pity. And so evocative of the human condition. How many of us get exactly what we expect? How many of us come within spitting distance? How many of us find ourselves in a territory so foreign from what we envisioned, we sometimes wonder what force carried us hither and set us down to live, completely surprised, sometimes traumatized, and usually at least a little bit bewildered?

Joanne’s words made me think about the unexpected course of my own life. As is the case for all of us, the surprises have come through a mix of choice and circumstance. When I got married, I never thought I’d end up with seven children–but an unexpected, near-constant desire for children gripped me for a dozen years, and I chose to follow it, and mother nature cooperated, so here I am in a household of nine. When I was a child old enough to be self-aware, I never expected to live a life complicated by chronic depression, but I do (and so do two of my children). When I was a young adult and envisioned my future offspring, I didn’t see a child with Down syndrome. There have been dozens of surprises, large and small, positive and negative and neutral. And no matter how often I counsel myself to expect the unexpected, it always takes me off-guard. I can’t trump the unpredictable and the unseen, although I’ve tried.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the surprises of life. About how to cope with the stark reality of the unexpected. I wonder how I can plan for life, knowing it very well may shred my plans–and that I might be better off as a result. I wonder how to walk the fine line between deliberate living and surrender.

Maybe deliberate surrender is an important part of the answer.

Nothing quite like

January 16th, 2009
Mothering, Musings

Wednesday was Elizabeth’s dance recital, the “Winter Showcase” featuring the various dance classes at the high school. Twelve performances on the program. Elizabeth’s was scheduled about a third of the way through. When the number started I leaned forward in my seat, eyes scanning the stream of dancers running onstage. Faces and bodies and faces and bodies and faces and–there! There she is, Reed and I exclaimed simultaneously, like the cheesy parents we are. There’s nothing quite like picking your child out of a crowd.

As the music pumped out of the PA I flashed back to the only other dance recital Elizabeth has been part of: the performance of the “Super Star Strutters” at the Independence Day parade in Spanish Fork. She was four years old then, dressed in a hot pink t-shirt and denim shorts, jumping and wiggling in time with the Beach Boys. Now she was clad in a skin-tight brilliant turquoise camisole and black leggings, limbs moving in sharp yet graceful precision to a pumping hip-hop rhythm.  When she turned I studied her back and shoulders, fair skin and tight muscle defined in light and shadow.  There’s nothing quite like realizing your preschooler has (really and truly) become a woman.

The dancers were an intriguing bunch. Some moved with near-painful hesitation, as if they weren’t sure their arms and legs would obey neural commands. Some were languid, like bored teenagers at Grandma’s Sunday dinner. Some danced as if they really meant it. Elizabeth was one of them. I watched her in fascination, being someone who’s never been fully at ease in her own skin–not in public, at least. Certainly not on stage.

As I absorbed the contrast between the fluid dancers and the stiff ones, I remembered something wise my friend Darlene once told me: All you’ll have at the end of your life, all you’ll take with you, is eighty-something years of being Kathy Soper. That took me by surprise. I don’t know why, but it did. I guess I’ve spent so much time and effort trying to change myself that I’ve rarely relaxed and just enjoyed being myself.

Applauding loudly at the end of the number, I reminded myself that I want to live the way Elizabeth dances. From what I’ve seen, there’s nothing quite like it.

You’ll notice. Oh yes, you’ll notice.

January 4th, 2009
Mothering, Rants

If I hear it one more time I might scream, or laugh hysterically in the face of a well-meaning friend. Neither of which would be good.

“It” is this: Once you have three children, you can have more and not really even notice.

Huh? I think whenever I hear this or a similar statement. Are you crazy? Are you stoned?

I have seven children. I am crazy. And some days, usually around 4 p.m., I wish I could get stoned.

(Okay, not really.)

(Yes, really.)

But the purpose of this post is not to complain about the difficulties of having a large family. I have many children by choice and I will not whine about how hard it is–at least, not in public. No, the purpose of this post is to highlight a common, wildly inaccurate public perception about having a large family.

Not that it’s wholly inaccurate–if it were, people would never say it. In a limited sense, having three kids really does “break” a mom. With one child, she has to figure out how to meet her own wants and needs while never failing to provide for her child’s, and how to forgive herself when she does fail. And she will fail, because a child’s needs are great, and a child’s wants are an endless chasm. With two, she has to figure out how to divide her mother-self among two fierce competitors. With three, she has to accept that she’ll never cover all the bases–ever.

That’s the breaking point which spawns the misconception, I think. Yes, a mother of three is well-acquainted with chaos, both literal and figurative. In order to survive, she must embrace it–or at least used to it. So it makes some sense to say that adding more chaos to existing chaos is easier than making the initial jump.

But let’s think for a minute about what it means to add a fourth, or fifth, or sixth child to a family. This isn’t just addition; it’s exponential expansion. The family organism doesn’t just increase by one person, it increases by five or six or seven relationships. It’s much more than another place setting at the table (Scoot over, everyone! There’s plenty of room!) or a bedroom tacked on to the house. It’s a clearly perceptible presence in every room, a thick layer of being that widely increases the girth of the family sphere and changes everything within it.

Of course, this is true no matter how many children a family includes. Every time a baby comes along, the family is reinvented and redefined–and while the reinventions that come with the first or second or third child are indeed huge, so are those which follow. So let’s not perpetuate the myth. Let’s not discredit the enormous ongoing adjustment process that grips large families. Let’s instead acknowledge that (in a healthy family, at least) a new child, whether she’s the first or the tenth, will always be noticed.

(see? no whining!)

Home

November 27th, 2008
Family, Loss

Any minute now, it will begin: first one car, then another, then another will drive into our cul-de-sac and park in front of the house across the street. As they do on every holiday, the Bishop’s children are coming home.

There are six of them, all adults now, several with children of their own. They clog the street with their SUVs and economy cars, and no doubt clog their mother’s kitchen with welcome laughter and unwelcome fingers picking at the platters of food still under construction. I imagine the scene, and I smile. If I’m lucky, it will be my future.

Our nearest family members live 800 miles away. In some of the years past, my husband’s parents have made the drive from Portland to share the holiday with us; a few times we’ve driven to them. But this year, like last, we’re home for Thanksgiving–the nine of us cozying up on a drizzly day with the smell of roasting turkey driving us mad. The air is rich with content. I am grateful, more than those eight letters can really signify, for the family within these walls. But then I think about my brother, and I am sad.

The call from Church headquarters came a month or so ago. “We have the records of (name),” the quavery-voiced woman said. I could picture her, white-haired and wrinkled, sitting in front of a computer monitor with my brother’s information glowing onscreen. “We would like to send them to his current ward. Do you have a street address or phone number for his place of residence?”

My mouth ran dry. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Is there someone we can contact who might have that information?”

“Not that I know of.” I swallowed hard. “None of us has heard from him for almost two years.”

She paused. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Yes. I was sorry, too, to hear the words spoken aloud. It had been months since I’d had cause to speak of my brother, and my sense of loss amplified anew. After I hung up the phone, I wept and wept.

My brother, my only blood sibling, two-and-a-half years older than I. Throughout our childhood he was my mind-twin, or perhaps, more accurately, my heart-twin, understanding things nobody else understood. He alone could comprehend the unfillable void in my chest that had yawned wide ever since our parents’ divorce. He alone shared my particular parcel of pain in the troubled blended family created by our mother’s remarriage. We didn’t speak our understanding aloud very often. We didn’t need to.

But while my life took an upswing after leaving home, his continued along the slow downward spiral we’d both been following throughout adolescence. His drug use became drug addiction. He was homeless for years, sleeping on friends’ couches and enjoying, at least some of the time, the freedom of uprootedness. He visited me once, ten years ago, when I had three small children in a tiny house. He and his friend, the delightfully odd bearded man named Jelly, arrived in a battered VW van (natch) and stayed for the afternoon, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and filling our washing machine drain with dirt from their incredibly filthy clothing. That was the last time I saw him.

Then came the car accident. Two people died; a strict new DUI law held him accountable. He received two prison sentences, each two to twenty years. After serving his minimum four years, he was released on a writ of habeus corpus due to controversies surrounding the new law and his attorney, who was disbarred soon after his trial. But after eighteen months, the state’s appeal was granted, and he was summoned back to prison to finish his 36 remaining years. Instead of complying, he ran.

I heard the news two Decembers ago. The children and I were decorating gingerbread men for Christmas when my mother called to tell me my brother had disappeared. I stood in the middle of my kitchen, hands dry and itchy with flour, apron smeared with butter, and felt utter rage. How could he do this? I thought. How could he do this to our mother? How could he do this to me? It was a betrayal of everything he’d been given over the course of his thirty-seven years–love, nurturing, compassion, forgiveness, encouragement. It was a betrayal of Home.

My rage is gone now, for the most part. It still flares now and again when I see and hear the effects of his choice on my mother, who grieves a certain yet ambiguous loss. “He could be dead,” she says. “And whenever he does die, I might not ever know.” But I believe that no matter how thickly brewed the pain can taste for all of us who love my brother, his is greater still. Even as my mother and I spoke that December evening, with my children chattering in the background and gobs of frosting hardening on the countertops, I was standing in the midst of everything warm and good, and he was moving farther and farther away from the chance of ever regaining it.

I don’t think of my brother often. I’ve had to close the door on his memory in order to minimize the impact of his choice on myself and my family. But on days like today, the door swings open. I remember holidays past, when he and I would be shuffled from one family gathering to another, trying to bridge the gap of a severed marriage. I remember our psychic closeness, which I’ve never experienced with any other person, not even my closest girlfriends, not even my husband. I wonder where he is right now, and who he’s with, and what he’s doing. And as I look around at my children, praying that one day they will eagerly return, like the Bishop’s children, to the heart of their upbringing, I pray that my brother can still hold and touch and feel a small piece of his own.

Frozen

January 21st, 2008
Musings

It’s snowing here today. I woke up to six inches of white covering the landscape, softening its angles, blurring its lines. More snow is falling, down and sideways, blown by frigid air.

Today, we’re staying in. It’s a holiday, and my husband and kids are home. Seven of the nine of us are sick. We’ll drink Lemon Zinger herbal tea and eat saltines. We’ll sip ginger ale and eat Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. We’ll watch movies, curled up on the couches with our blankets, and be glad we’re not out in the cold. Maybe if we weren’t sick we’d pull on our gloves and hats and boots and build a family of snowmen in our backyard. There’s enough snow to make nine, one for each of us, a frozen version of our family. Or maybe we’d grab our snow saucers and head for the park with the big hill, where dozens of kids are probably gathered right now, bright-colored caps making streaks of color as they fly down the slope, gasping and laughing. Before we did that, though, we’d put on our suits and dresses and heavy coats and head for church, van wheels sliding on the ice, for the funeral.

Harrison was nineteen, maybe twenty. Very handsome. Quick, strong, vibrant–until leukemia sapped life from the very marrow of his bones. They gave him new marrow, liquid hope. But it was not enough.

My kids prayed for him, fasted for him. They didn’t really know him, but they knew his mother, and they knew cancer was something serious enough to go hungry for. Saturday night, right after family prayer, I told them he had died. I didn’t want to. They were already weak, feverish, vulnerable. But they needed to know.

“I prayed for him,” Christine said. “I thought he would get better.”

It was a risk, involving my kids in Harrison’s illness. From the start I wondered how it would end, and what I would say if it ended in death. And there are things to say to Christine–that her prayers were pure, and loving, and good. That her prayers helped comfort him.

There are things to say to Harrison’s parents, too. That their son was pure, and loving, and good. That we will do all we can to comfort them. Hundreds of people are gathering, even as I type, even as the pan of potato casserole for the wake browns in my oven, to comfort them.

Even so, they must stand in the frigid air today, and commit their son’s cold body to the earth. Nobody can save them from that. And afterward, all the people surrounding them will join them for a meal, breaking bread together in shared loss, and then get in their cars and go home, to their own lives. They’ll sit on the couch and turn on the TV, curled up in a blanket. Or they’ll pull out their sleds and snowballing gloves. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It will not do Harrison any good for his neighbors to live less.

But his parents will live less, for a time. And they will live differently, for the rest of their days.

It’s snowing here today.

Fleshy Tablets

July 23rd, 2007
Spirituality

I have a tattoo on my left ankle.

A crucifix, blue-black, one inch long. A punk crucifix, anti-religious, if anything. Homemade, in 1988. President Hinckley hadn’t yet made his pronouncement against tattooing, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have stopped me. In fact, I would have been all the more eager to grab a needle.

My kids hate the tattoo. They’ve had a dozen or more lessons on bodies-as-temples, and they’re pretty freaked about the “graffiti” on mine. Every few months or so, they notice the ink on my ankle and remind me that tattooing is wrong. And whenever we pass the Laser Tattoo Removal billboard on I-15, one of the kids inevitably comments, “That’s for you, Mom.” They don’t like their mother wearing a mark of disobedience.

I can sympathize. Once I escaped the misery that spawned the tattoo, I hated it myself. It was a token of a time I wanted to forget, a time of deep unhappiness, self-destruction, shame. A time when I happily punctured my own skin with a needle rapid as a woodpecker, driving ink below the surface in an attempt to impress my peers, and myself.

I’ve spent many years hiding the mark with socks and band-aids. I’ve made a point to cross my ankles right-over-left, especially at church, to keep it out of easy view. I’ve wished I had the cash to get the thing lasered off, to burn the dark skin and darker memories into oblivion. Even when tattoos became hip, I still wanted mine gone. It’s hardly a nifty little butterfly.

But a few weeks ago, as I drove past that I-15 billboard, I realized things have changed, in more ways than one. These days I can afford a few hundred dollars for a little skin scorching. But I don’t want to do it.

I like my tattoo.

No, I don’t like the way it looks. As I’ve aged the lines of the crucifix have fuzzed a bit, making it appear especially crude; purple spider veins have crawled their way around it, like bloody vines. It’s undeniably ugly. But I no longer want to forget the ugliness in my past. By remembering, I also remember how God grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and lifted me out of that hell. I remember the saviors God sent to me, wearing all kinds of unlikely disguises. And I remember One in particular.

Funny, that I’ve embraced the sole Christian religion that doesn’t embrace the crucifix as a visual symbol of their faith. In their focus on the living Christ, Mormons don’t wear crosses around their necks. But I’m not sorry that I have one engraved on my body. And I will teach my children why. I will teach them that redemption must be remembered, and not only on Sunday. Every day.

Like yesterday. I was visiting teaching Amy, a single mother, a grandmother, and a heroin addict fresh out of rehab. We wrote letters to each other while she was in her treatment program and began face-to-face visits last month, when she finished. She’s an amazing woman–bright, candid, real. During our visits she describes, sober-faced, the depraved state of being she lived in for two decades, and how God is leading her out.

She just received her patriarchal blessing. “I don’t remember much of what was said,” she told me yesterday, “except for this: ‘You are forgiven.’”

I looked down at my ankles, crossed left-over-right. And I nodded, and wept.